Comparing the Human and Chimpanzee Genomes

As part of the Explore Evolution exhibit at the University of Nebraska State Museum, Judy Diamond displays a segment of the human genome in line with that of the chimpanzee that matches very closely. The point is to show how similar two are with the few differences represented by a drawing of a man, distinguished geneticist Svante Paabo.

Richard Dawkins explains the exhibit in the video below:

This of course makes me wonder what other segments, that might not be so closely matched, look like.

1 Comment

Different visualizations would have to be used. A lot of the bigger differences have to do with reorganizations of large pieces of DNA (deletions, inversions, duplications…). The single-nucleotide variants (aka polymorphisms, SNPs) illustrated here are only one kind of variant.